Busy: A badge of honour or a big lie?

Forget being busy. Be this instead if you want to get things done and feel good about it.

by Alina Dizik, BBC News

Busy, busy, busy — but not really getting anything done? From the idea of the “busy trap” to the overwhelming feeling many professionals have at the end of each day and week, overload is a real issue.

But what if we’re looking at the issue in the wrong way? What if you could reframe your thinking, feel less busy and perhaps get more done? It’s a topic several LinkedIn Influencers weighed in on this week.

Travis Bradberry, president at TalentSmart “Being busy has somehow become a badge of honor. The prevailing notion is that if you aren’t super busy, you aren’t important or hard working,” wrote Bradberry in his post How Being Busy Makes You Unproductive. “The truth is, busyness makes you lessproductive.”

“David Meyer from the University of Michigan published a study recently that showed that switching what you’re doing mid-task increases the time it takes you to finish both tasks by 25%,” Bradberry wrote.

Another data point: “Microsoft decided to study this phenomenon in their workers and found that it took people an average of 15 minutes to return to their important projects… every time they were interrupted by e-mails, phone calls, or other messages,” Bradberry wrote. “They didn’t spend the 15 minutes on the interrupting messages, either; the interruptions led them to stray to other activities, such as surfing the web for pleasure.”